Scientists
question the Times Union’s reporting on Ward Stone
and his role in the 1999 West Nile virus outbreak

By
Chet Hardin

Photos
by Joe Putrock

Dr.
Nicholas Komar loves to speculate on the ways that West
Nile virus might have reached the Western Hemisphere, he
says, “because that’s all you can do, is speculate.” At
one time he had counted 13 different ways that the flavivirus
could have made it to our shores. “The most likely scenario
is that a mosquito got infected in the Middle East or North
Africa, where nobody was doing surveillance, and there was
a burst of activity and a lot of mosquitoes got infected.
One of those mosquitoes was near an airport and saw a dark
space to go rest, in the hull of an airplane. And when they
woke up the next morning, they were in New York City. And
then they got out of the plane and flew around. They were
hungry, so they went and fed on a pigeon or whatever happened
to be around. Then that bird went on to infect the mosquito
population in New York City. And that’s as realistic as
any other theory.”

Komar, a vertebrate ecologist for the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention, says that he spends about 99 percent
of his time studying West Nile ecology and developing better
surveillance techniques for tracking the virus. He has authored
or co-authored more than 80 scientific publications on the
subject since August 1999, when the then-unidentified pathogen
was racing through the mosquito population in New York City
and he was part of the team sent in by the CDC to investigate.

On Aug. 23, 1999, a physician in Queens contacted the city’s
health department to report that his hospital was treating
an unusually high number of patients suffering with encephalitis,
swelling of the brain usually due to viral infection. A
week later, the city health department officially invited
the CDC in to investigate the growing cluster of encephalitis
illnesses.

In June, crows with the encephalitic symptoms—febrile, with
head tremors, unable to stand or walk—were spotted dying
in violent seizures in the streets of Queens. In July, crows
with similar symptoms were seen wobbling down the streets
of the Bronx, dying similar deaths. By mid-August, an alarming
number of birds were being shipped to the laboratory of
the state’s wildlife pathologist, Ward Stone, from throughout
the boroughs, as well as from Nassau and Suffolk counties,
even Westchester.

Dr. Basil Tangredi, an instructor of conservation medicine
at Green Mountain College in Vermont, was a veterinarian
and wildlife rehabilitator on Long Island at the time, and
he recalls the outbreak vividly. “Everyone in New York state
was getting all these sick birds, and Ward—and his very,
very minuscule team—was working around the clock processing
these cases. The fear factor was amazing. It was front-page
news for so long, and he was right at the center of the
storm on that. He was sending material to everybody to get
it diagnosed.”

In a letter dated Nov. 15, 1999, Stone wrote to state Assemblyman
Samuel Colman that by the end of August he had diagnosed
a “viral encephalitis of unknown specific etymology” as
the likely cause of death in some of the birds, along with
the more common deaths attributable to shootings, traumas,
the fungal infection Aspergillosis and the viral Avian Pox,
as well as poisonings.

On Sept. 3, the CDC announced that the city was likely under
the siege of a St. Louis encephalitis outbreak. The insecticide
malathion was sprayed throughout the city from helicopters.
But it was the wrong diagnosis. While St. Louis encephalitis
would account for the human deaths, it made no sense with
the crows. Birds are carriers of St. Louis, but are otherwise
unaffected by the virus. The connection between the bird
deaths and the human deaths hadn’t yet been made, although
there were suspicions.

“We
weren’t sure what virus it was yet, and while we waited
to find out, we speculated about what it could be,” says
Komar. “We knew that West Nile was a possibility, because
we are aware of diseases in other parts of the world. When
I did my testing of the specimens that I had collected,
I tested them for West Nile virus antibodies and St. Louis
encephalitis antibodies and found that they had a high number
of West Nile virus antibodies.”

By Sept. 25, the news broke. The CDC had positively identified
the West Nile virus for the first time ever in America.
In all, seven people were reported to have died in the outbreak,
along with thousands of birds.

Over the months that followed, Komar dedicated his laboratory
at the CDC to test for West Nile, he says, because there
was no laboratory in the country that could handle testing
all the dead birds that were being collected. “Thousands
of dead birds were submitted to my laboratory from all over
the Northeast and Eastern United States. We did the dead
bird testing from all the state laboratories.”

Komar’s laboratory developed the testing protocols and guided
the states on which birds to test and what kinds of tests
to use. “The next year we got funding to support the states
to develop their own testing capacities,” he says. Until
then, “there was no state-based avian mortality surveillance
testing for mosquito-borne viruses.”

Last
month, the Albany Times Union published its second
expose on Ward Stone in a matter of months. Written by James
Odato, it was the two in a one-two punch. In May, the TU
had published a long Sunday piece, also written by Odato,
detailing a number of allegations made against Stone by
colleagues and former subordinates: that he had misused
state funds, that he had abused his staff, that he had taken
up residency in his office, and had cruelly gut-shot penned
deer. The state inspector general opened an investigation
due to Odato’s reporting, and Stone countered most of the
allegations in the pages of Metroland days later.

The second article, headlined “Ward Stone’s research role
raises doubt—Scientists say state wildlife pathologist misdiagnosed
1999 crow deaths, losing weeks of warning,” spent 1,600
words exploring the allegation that Stone’s inability to
properly diagnose the vast number of crows that began dying
in late summer of 1999 as possibly leading to the human
deaths that were to follow.

As Stone puts it, the first article was designed by his
enemies to hurt him personally, digging into his private
and financial life, going so far as to mention the death
of his infant daughter. The second article, he says, “is
coming after my science, which is a mistake. I think that
you’ll find that my science will hold up. It’s pretty good.”

At the core of Odato’s article is the accusation that Stone
is an insubstantial scientist, unconcerned with the rigors
demanded by the field, too wedded to his environmental ideology
of “chasing down toxics.” And in 1999, the article alleges,
he was perhaps blinded by this ideology, failing to grasp
the epidemic spreading around him. The article relies almost
exclusively on an interview conducted with a former pathologist
for the Bronx Zoo, Dr. Tracey McNamara. In the article,
McNamara tells Odato that Stone “blew it,” incorrectly diagnosing
the bird deaths that his lab was processing, wasting valuable
time during those critical weeks of late August.

McNamara, like Stone, was at the heart of the outbreak,
and has been widely credited in the media as being instrumental
in chasing down the mystery of the West Nile. In the Sept.
26, 1999, New York Times article in which the CDC
officially announced its identification of West Nile, Dr.
Duane Gubler, the head of the CDC’s arbovirus field station
in Fort Collins, Colo., said that the CDC “would not have
made the diagnosis of West Nile virus as quickly without
Dr. McNamara’s persistent medical sleuthing.” Four days
later, a Daily News article reported that McNamara
was “credited with pinpointing a virtually unknown virus
that eluded the combined resources of the nation’s top public
health experts.”

And last year, in a bio for McNamara included in the literature
for a lecture at Western University of Health Sciences in
California, where she is now a professor, it was noted that
she has been “profiled in numerous publications including
New York Times, The Chicago Tribune,The
Washington Post, Nature, Smithsonian Magazine
and many others.” Her research from that frightening summer
was trumpeted as ultimately leading “to a diagnosis of West
Nile virus.”

In Odato’s article, McNamara said that she remembered a
“heated conversation” with Stone during Labor Day weekend
in 1999. She was yelling at Stone, she said, over a comment
he had made in an Aug. 26 Queens Chronicle article,
in which he had stated that his preliminary research suggested
that the crows in the city were dying off due to pesticides
and fungal infection.

From the TU: “I said ‘what is he, nuts?’ ” McNamara
said. “I was yelling at him: ‘What are you talking about?’
I said: ‘It’s not pesticides, it’s viral.’ I said: ‘Didn’t
you do this, didn’t you do that?’ She says she urged him
to send samples to nationally affiliated laboratories.”

Stone says that he doesn’t recall much of the conversation,
and he also doesn’t recall offhand the specific date that
he began seeking the virology tests from outside laboratories.
He doesn’t need to. The outbreak of West Nile was a thoroughly
documented phenomenon, the critical dates of which are easily
tracked down. Odato, in his article, points to the 2000
report prepared by the United States General Accounting
Office. The report notes the date that Stone began contacting
state labs, the first step in seeking virology testing for
the dead birds, as Aug. 30. The GAO report also noted that
McNamara had actually put in her call to Stone on Sept.
1, and not, as Odato reported, “during Labor Day weekend.”

Metroland
sought clarification from Rex Smith, the editor of the Times
Union, on some of the research that went into the paper’s
reporting on Stone. Smith declined to comment weeks ago,
stating that if the TU has “more to say about Ward
Stone, we will do it in the columns of the Times Union,
where readers can have confidence that . . . it will be
reported fully and fairly.”

CDC’s Komar worked closely with Stone in the early days
of the outbreak, and in the early months to track the pathogen’s
spread. He says that he is familiar with Odato’s article,
and that he disagrees with the core assertion that Stone’s
handling of the outbreak was flawed.

“The
very first bird that was submitted and then finally found
out to have West Nile infection was a bird that he had processed
and then sent on to a federal laboratory,” Komar says, a
fact that is overlooked in the article, “because all of
the people telling the story didn’t even realize that that
was the case.”

The initial path for Stone to receive the virology testing
needed, says Komar, was to first go to his state health
department. From there, he appropriately struck out to other
agencies.

“He
didn’t have a virology laboratory,” says Komar. “He didn’t
have a means of identifying viral infections in his laboratory,
so he would have to send specimens on to another laboratory
for that purpose. And in the case of an unknown pathogen,
he would have to go to a federal laboratory, and the appropriate
laboratory was the National Veterinary Services Laboratories
in Ames, Iowa.”

“As
things came to a head in early September,” Komar recalls,
“laboratories like Ward Stone’s and Tracey McNamara’s at
the Bronx Zoo started submitting specimens that they had
to the national veterinary laboratory, and they tested them
all at once, isolating a virus. That virus was sent on to
the CDC for identification, and was identified as West Nile
virus. And when they went back to see which specimens had
been sent, the two specimens that I remember, one of them
came from Tracey McNamara’s laboratory and one came from
Ward Stone’s laboratory. And the one from Ward Stone’s laboratory
was collected a day earlier than the other one.”

“So
that was the first bird positively identified for West Nile.
It was an American crow from Stone’s laboratory,” Komar
chuckles. “So that’s the real story.”

According to Dr. Doug Pedersen, with the National Veterinary
Services Laboratory, the virus isolated in the American
crow that Stone submitted is the official reference strain
of West Nile in America, “the virus that we chose to propagate
in the lab and continue to work with.”

Further, Komar flatly rejects McNamara’s claim that had
it not been for Stone, lives likely could have been saved.
“No. That’s not fair, because as soon as it was identified
that there was a cluster of human disease, that cluster
was investigated. As soon as it was investigated, mosquito-born
viruses were considered a possible source. And as soon as
it was identified to be a mosquito-born virus, the same
precautions would have been taken regardless of what kind
of virus it was. The identification of West Nile virus in
New York City did not alter what was done to protect human
health. Those steps had already been taken.”

“If
you are not aware of a potential problem and you aren’t
doing surveillance, then you aren’t aware of a problem until
it has blown up in your face,” Komar says. “And by the time
you can respond to it, the natural process of transmission
can be over. There is nothing that would have been done
differently in that summer. Not a thing.”

‘Scientists
familiar with Stone’s work at the time,” Odato wrote, “say
he had received dead crows several weeks before the first
human infections surfaced on Aug. 23, but misdiagnosed what
was killing the birds, blaming fungus and pesticides.” Alongside
McNamara, Odato presented Dr. John Charos, a veterinarian
with New York City’s Central Veterinarian Services. According
to Odato, Charos “first sent dead crows to Stone around
July 1999, he said, because he thought the state pathologist
was the right person to handle the mystery.”

Odato continued: “He said Stone allowed him to send the
dead birds by overnight mail and bill the state. ‘. . .
Did the guy drop the ball? Maybe he wasn’t looking deep
enough.’ ”

When contacted by Metroland, Charos said that he
hasn’t seen the Odato article and asked for a copy to be
e-mailed to him. When told how he was quoted and in what
context, Charos expressed surprise.

“You
know, as I told the other reporter—and it looked like that
reporter really wasn’t interested in all the facts, as far
as what took place that fall—I think the system worked as
it should,” Charos says. He says that it was apparent to
him that Odato was working on a story “that was being sought
after.” Odato’s questions, he says, “were skewed. He was
asking, ‘Can you find any faults? He said it was pesticides
and fungal.’ And my comment to him was, that was the most
common thing.”

Stone’s DEC colleagues Joseph Therrien and Lawrence C. Skinner
were also quoted in the article. When contacted by Metroland,
DEC spokesman Yancey Roy said that the agency is not speaking
about Stone due to the IG’s investigation.

A call to Therrien’s cell phone was not returned.

“As
I told the other reporter: Did Ward drop the ball because
he was looking for funguses and pesticides?” Charos asks.
“Basically, common things happen commonly. You have a new
disease that’s never been in this country before, human
nature would be to look for the common things, not to look
for West Nile.”

He notes that bird deaths from pesticides are an all-too-common
occurrence, and that there would have been nothing shocking
if Stone’s preliminary findings turned up a large number
of such deaths. “Throughout the year, birds die, and in
the summer more so, as there are more poisonings going on,
more pesticides.”

“We
are always trying to fit what we are seeing into the context
of what we have seen before,” says Dr. Tangredi of Green
Mountain College. “When you hear hoof beats, you look for
horses and not zebras. Here were these crows coming in with
head tremors, they were in a stupor, and not because they
were debilitated, most of the time they were in fine flesh.
And we were used to seeing birds like I just described that
were poisoned. So Ward is hearing hoof beats, and so toxics
are probably running through his mind. I know that it was
running through mine. I was thinking, My God, are we starting
to see something new that ChemLawn is using? But as it unfolded,
the pattern of illnesses of the birds was different than
it would be for a pesticide. Then you start expanding your
view of what it could be. You start sending samples to various
labs.”

Tangredi argues that Stone was “always trying to chase down
toxics,” as one of his critics in the TU article
puts it, because there were always toxics to be chased down.
He points out that it was Stone’s work investigating the
pesticide diazinon that was “instrumental in getting that
banned in turf grass in New York state.” The first case
in which Tangredi worked with Stone was on the death of
a great horned owl “that died before my very eyes right
on my exam table. Ward diagnosed it as Chlordane toxicity.
That led to publications. He led the charge to get Chlordane
banned for New York state.”

Dr. Douglas Roscoe, supervisor of the Office of Fish and
Wildlife Health and Forensics for New Jersey’s Department
of Environmental Protection, points out that there is never
one thing going on by itself, that wildlife pathologists
will see a myriad diseases and poisonings, especially in
the late summer weeks. “There is a seasonality to certain
mortality events, and when you are talking about that time
of year, July and August, and into September, you have those
kinds of poisoning events. But the fact that he had poisoning
events that he was involved with didn’t alter the fact that
he was certainly involved with West Nile virus early on,
before anyone else really had a grasp on what was happening
with the crows.” He says that it was Stone who had contacted
him in September to warn him that there was an unknown pathogen
that was killing crows in New York and that he ought to
be on the lookout in his state.

“In
terms of what is happening now,” says Tangredi, “with the
questioning of who thought of what first, and all this retrospective,
hindsight deal, that’s sort of unusual for scientists. This
discussion should take place in the pages of the journals,
where during the process of editorial evaluation of a proposed
paper, the people reviewing the paper would question certain
things. In order to do that, you have to have all of your
references lined up. You have to have all of your documentation.
It is a lot easier to tell it to a journalist.”

Charos says that he can’t find fault with Stone’s performance.
“I think that it has become more of an issue of bragging
rights,” he says. “I don’t understand the politics behind
all of this. I don’t even know why it is even an issue.
I am surprised that, years later, this is even going on.”

When contacted by Metroland, McNamara said she feels
that she has been quoted extensively on the subject of the
early days of West Nile, and maintained that what she is
solely interested in is people learning from the mistakes
that were made in 1999, in the hopes of better protecting
against another outbreak.

In April of this year, she told Newsweek: “The bigger
point that gets lost in this whole story is that crows had
been dying since early June, but the disease wasn’t quickly
and correctly diagnosed by state wildlife officials. Why?
Wildlife are free-ranging so losses aren’t immediately noticed
and it can take quite a few deaths before an investigation
is launched. Second, until just recently, disease diagnosis
wasn’t a mandate of state wildlife agencies and it isn’t
their forte. Third, labs are terribly underfunded and staff
may not even be required to have actual training in diagnostic
pathology. Put those all together and you have a real vulnerability
as far as surveillance goes.”

Dr.
Roscoe derides what he calls “the old 20-20 hindsight routine.
I suppose a nuclear blast over the marshes would have resolved
it. Unfortunately, biological phenomenon don’t lend themselves
to retrospective control efforts.”

At first, Roscoe refused to speak with Metroland.
“I am familiar with the articles about Ward, and I do not
want to participate,” he said, slamming down his phone.
Reached a second time, and with a little coaxing, the longtime
colleague of Stone responded to the chief allegation made
in Odato’s article, that the spread of West Nile might have
been stayed had it not been for Stone’s response.

“When
you introduce a disease into a naïve population, it has
a tendency to explode and you have an epidemic. And you
can’t get ahead of it,” he says, adding that he believes
that the 1999 response to West Nile was “actually a surprisingly
rapid and efficient response.”

Roscoe met Stone in 1973, when, as a young college graduate,
he went to work with him in Delmar as a fish and wildlife
technician. Stone had been the state’s wildlife pathologist
for only four years at the time. “I remember when I was
working with Ward, our theme at that time was, ‘If you aren’t
catching hell for something, you aren’t doing your job.’
And I don’t think that that has changed. There is nothing
that our agencies can do without someone being disenchanted.”

Roscoe
says that he hasn’t read the TU articles about Stone,
and he doesn’t plan to: “I don’t see much utility in them.”
As to why some might be criticizing Stone in the pages of
the local daily, he says, “There is always that ever- present
human foible jealousy, and you can be certain that some
of these people might be jealous.”

“In
my experience,” Roscoe says, “Ward has been on top of a
lot of topical and important disease problems. The one thing
that I am sure of is that there certainly wasn’t any bounds
to Ward’s interests in causes of mortality.”

“Some
of the early work on Chlordane triggered additional work
that we did in New Jersey,” Roscoe continues. “We hadn’t
even diagnosed it in New Jersey and Ward got a bird from
New Jersey from some woman who owned property in Bergen
County, and somehow it got up to Ward. And he said, ‘Hey
you got chlordane over there.’ And I was like, ‘How about
that.’ If Ward wasn’t so obstinate, he wouldn’t have been
so successful in ferreting out these unusual events and
getting explanations for these complex things that happen.
He has a list of collaborators on the articles that he has
written, so it is not like he is a lone wolf out there.
He appears to have an orderly, scientific approach to things.
He can support his work through refereed publications.”

But you can be certain, Roscoe says, that Stone’s pioneering,
combative approach to environmental science has earned him
“the double-edged sword of notoriety.”

For his part, Stone seems frustrated by the task, years
later, of tracking down the dates of when he began sending
birds to national laboratories. He spends three hours going
through the black binders of documents from the time, stacked
two feet high on a small table in what seems like the only
air-conditioned room in the Wildlife Pathology Unit building
at Five Rivers Environmental Center in Delmar, before finally
losing his temper.

“I
am not very popular among certain people,” Stone says, “because
I can be demanding. I despise lazy people. Anyone that comes
to wildlife pathology ought to be here to save the world.”

He is equally frustrated by the idea that anyone would claim
that they were the single person who led to the positive
identification of West Nile in those confusing weeks in
1999. “That was a team effort. And I was working with a
good team, the best team,” Stone says. “The truth is, had
there been no Tracey McNamara, had there been no Ward Stone,
the outcome, what finally took place, wouldn’t have been
significantly changed.”

He abruptly loses interest. “This is a waste of my time,”
he says, jumping to his feet, wide-eyed. The interview is
over. There is a botulism outbreak in lakes Erie and Ontario
that he ought to be out investigating. Thousands of birds
are dying. There is science to be done.